A patent application published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday reveals Apple is looking into a display adjustment system that can selectively change the appearance of multiple UI elements, a departure from the current global-only settings seen today.

Source: USPTO

The document, titled "User Interface Contrast Filter," describes a display adjustment tool that can differentiate multiple UI elements and alter their individual appearance with a single user input.

Almost all applications on the market today have visual UIs, which usually take the form of buttons, sliders, menus and selection controls that are overlaid on a background color or image. These elements combine with interactive content display areas to form the basic user interface.

Apple notes that many users adjust the brightness or contrast settings that control how the UI is displayed. How they make these adjustments depends on environment, visibility or personal preference. For example, in iOS the brightness of a display can be dimmed manually or automatically with help from ambient light sensors. The brightness and contrast changes are global, meaning they affect all UI elements equally.

There are times, however, that a user may want to change only certain elements in a UI, while leaving content display areas untouched. Thus, instead of universal display settings, Apple proposes a system that can filter or make intuitive changes to multiple UI elements in a selective manner. This would allow menu bars, text elements and controls to be adjusted separately from content.

To efficiently recognize and change each element, the system looks at color saturation, or more specifically, saturated pixels versus non-saturated pixels. In one embodiment, the non-saturated pixels are associated with areas that don't hold active content, and therefore show the most change when display adjustments are made.

In other embodiments, a mask can be applied to the sections of a display that are not to be modified, such as content areas. When this technique is used, the mask can be a simple generated black and white image. The UI elements under the white portion would become adjustable by the user, while the black areas would remain static.

The paper goes into great detail as to how adjustments are performed on individual pixels, including calibration and luminance data, color saturation, gray values and more. Apple notes that the system can work with automatic display settings with minimal user input. Aside from enhanced visibility, the process may also save battery life in some cases.

With its system-level UI element recognition, the method could theoretically be introduced without putting too much strain on third-party app developers.

Apple's selective UI filter patent application was first filed for in April and credits Patrick O. Heynen, Michael P. Stern, Andrew Bryant, Marian E. Goldeen and William J. Feth as its inventors.

Can someone explain to me how to get 'Auto Brightness' to work in iOS 6? We have two iPhone 4S's that have iOS 6, and 'Auto Brightness' does not work on either of them. I do remember it working in iOS 5, but I cannot remember it working since both iPhones were upgraded to iOS 6. At first, I thought that my iPhone had a hardware failure, but after seeing that neither of our iPhone 4S's 'Auto Brightness' works, I am now believing that perhaps there may be another reason that 'Auto Brightness' does not work. Any ideas, thoughts or help is appreciated. In advance, thank you.

Edit / Update: I guess that it is possible that we do have two devices that either have faulty hardware or that maybe both of our devices have had the same hardware failure that affects the ambient background lighting sensor to fail, causing the 'Auto Brightness' function to fail and to not work correctly, yes?Edited by Digital_Guy - 8/29/13 at 5:01am

I may be reading a bit into this, but I think an embodiment of this patent is already being used in IOS7. Currently the lock screen adjusts its GUI colors/brightness/contrast automatically to make sure it stands out against whatever background image is used, that pretty much is what this patent is all about. As AI is reporting, "Apple notes that the system can work with automatic display settings with minimal user input."

More useless ideas, fix up what you already have.
Sitting on $140B and still stingy to fix up the iOS keyboard, the lag when typing, home button freezing, wi-fi issues, I can go on and on.

Do you think that everyone from Apple is working from the same to-do list? If someone is working on improving the visibility of UI elements that means no one is working on WiFi or keyboard input? Besides, your list of complaints doesn't overlap at all with my pet peeves (unless your home button "freezing" is the same as my home button "lag" for double taps). They keyboard works great for me, I hope any incremental improvements they make (and they will) won't degrade my experience.

Well Apple had the audacity to pattern a rectangle with round corners.
Apple are the ultimate copiers, and when people mention this or complain that perhaps the god phone is not all that its cracked up to be, fanbois get their nickers in a twist. Yet throw muck at other phones.

Like this piece of crap Galaxy S4 I'm posting from?

Posted from my Galaxy S4.

Better than my Bose, better than my Skullcandy's, listening to Mozart through my LeBron James limited edition PowerBeats by Dre is almost as good as my Sennheisers.